TMS flash array blows Big Blue away • The Register

While flash memory chips cost more per Gigabyte to store data than a comparable spinning disk drive, we’re not talking about that at all. We’re talking about fast blinding speed of Input/Output operations, reading and writing data. And for that Flash Memory Chips are king of the hill, and now have the benchmarks to prove it once and for all time.

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Image by teclasorg via Flickr

Texas Memory Systems has absolutely creamed the SPC-1 storage benchmark with a system that comfortably exceeds the current record-holding IBM system at a cost per transaction of 95 per cent less.

One might ask a simple question, how is this even possible given the cost of the storage media involved. How is it a Flash based storage array from RamSan beat a huge pile of IBM hard drives all networked and bound together in a massive storage system? And how did it do it for less? Woe be to those unschooled in the ways of the Per-feshunal Data Center purchasing dept. You cannot enter the halls of the big players unless you got million dollar budgets for big iron servers and big iron storage. Fibre Channel and Infiniband rule the day when it comes to big data throughput. All those spinning drives accessed simultaneously as if each one held one slice of the data you were asking for, each one delivering up it’s 1/10 of 1% of the total file you were trying to retrieve. And the resulting speed makes it look like one hard drive that is 10X10 faster than your desktop computer hard drive all through the smoke and mirrors of the storage controllers and the software that makes them go. But what if, just what if we decided to take Flash memory chips and knit them together with a storage controller that made them appear to be just like a big iron storage system? Well since Flash obviously costs something more than $1 per gigabyte and disk drives cost somewhere less than 10 cents per gigabyte the Flash storage loses right?

In terms of total storage capacity Flash will lose for quite some time when you are talking about holding everything on disk all at the same time. But that is not what’s being benchmarked here at all. No, in fact what is being benchmarked is the rate at which Input (writing of data) and Output (reading of data) is done through the storage controllers. IOPS measure the total number of completed reads/writes done in a given amount of time. Previous to this latest example of the RamSan-630, IBM was king of the mountain with it’s huge striped Fibre Channel arrays all linked up through it’s own storage array controllers. RamSan came in at 400,503.2 IOPS as compared to IBM’s top of the line San Volume Controller with 380,489.3. That’s not very much difference you say, especially considering how much smaller the amount of data a RamSan can hold,… And that would be a valid argument but consider again, that’s not what we’re benchmarking it is the IOPS.

Total cost for the IBM benchmarked system per IOP was $18.83. RamSan (which best IBM in total IOPS) was a measly $1.05 per IOP. The cost is literally 95% less than IBM’s cost. Why? Consider the price (even if it was steeply discounted as most Tech Writers will say as a cavea) for IBM’s benchmarked system costs $7.17Million dollars. Remember I said you need million dollar budgets to play in the data center space. Now consider the RamSan-630 costs $419,000. If you want speed, dump your spinning hard drives, Flash is here to stay and you cannot argue with the speed versus the price at this level of performance. No doubt this is going to threaten the livelihood of a few big iron storage manufacturers. But through disruption, progress is made.